


Visitor

by NikaV



Series: Unknown [1]
Category: Doctor Who (2005), Torchwood
Genre: Dr Nyarlathotep, Gen, Not Beta Read, Sort Of, Tags Contain Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-13
Updated: 2020-04-13
Packaged: 2021-03-01 19:22:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,620
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23632300
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NikaV/pseuds/NikaV
Summary: Jack Harkness receives an unexpected visitor in Cardiff.
Series: Unknown [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1726297
Comments: 4
Kudos: 29





	Visitor

**Author's Note:**

> The result of reading too much Lovecraft.
> 
> In the text editor, this story contained exactly 8888 characters.

The weather had been strange for several days outside the base of Torchwood Cardiff. Captain Jack Harkness had noticed it first a little over two days ago, returning from a routine Weevil hunt. The air smelled of lightning and rain, as if a great storm were rolling in from the west. He had urged his team to return to their homes before the storm made landfall. 

The next day, however, when he asked the individual members of his team how they’d weathered the storm, they’d all reported that the skies had been clear, and the temperature rather pleasant for the time of year. There had been no storm.

It puzzled Jack, but, in all fairness, Jack Harkness was a man with better things to do than puzzle about the weather of the British Isles. Weather in those parts of the world was strange on the best of days, and capricious besides. 

The next day, Jack Harkness stepped outside, shortly after nightfall, just to get a break from the paperwork he was filling in, and to see if the storm he’d expected the day before might appear after all. There had been a strange oppressiveness to the air all day, he felt, and a storm would freshen everything right up. 

It was strange that the air would feel this way, since it was well past the height of summer, and on the verge of autumn. Jack Harkness stood looking out over the water. The air was still oppressive, but once again the smell of lightning lingered in his nose. The water, in contrast, seemed calm enough, aside from a soft breeze that brought the salty smell of the ocean with it. 

He stood there, somehow transfixed by the view, for a long hour. During that time, the weight of the air did not lift, and the storm did not come, even as the smell of it lingered on the air. At last, deciding that a storm was not forthcoming, and that he really should be getting back to his paperwork, Jack wrenched himself away from his place near the water. 

He did not sleep much that night, dreaming as he did of storms of fire and storms of ice. But he never slept much, and nightmares were very much not unusual for him. 

Awaking in the morning, he made ready for the day and for his team. They suffered a merry hunt for an artifact that had landed through the rift, but had been picked up by a teenager before they could get to it. The matter of the weather was once more driven from Jack’s mind. 

Again, it was only late at night, after dark, that the subject entered into his thoughts. He was sitting at his desk, filling in more of the paperwork he loathed. There was a lot of paperwork to do because of the teenager that got involved. As he was puzzling out which forms to fill in and which to leave by the wayside, it occurred to him that he was hearing the sound of a great wind. It was a ferocious sound, made worse by the underground situation of the Torchwood Hub. 

It seemed to whistle and shriek around the tower, and even the Pterodactyl that called it home was seeking refuge down below. Had the storm Jack had been expecting for days finally arrived? 

Fearlessly, the Captain stepped outside, ready to feel the rain on his face and watch the lightning bolt across the sky. He could hear the thunder clearly. 

But when he stepped outside, utter calm greeted him. It was only now that the good Captain started suspecting foul play, for he could still hear the storm raging about him, but there was no source for the noise in the weather. 

His first suspicion, of course, was aliens. But were they hostile? What was their intent, what did they want? What kind of aliens could these be? 

The noise grew louder, and Jack Harkness was afraid his eardrums might burst. Now that he was listening carefully, the sound was not that of a storm, though it had much in common with that. There was a shrieking, thundering quality to it that almost sounded like a voice. 

Jack rushed back inside the base. He feared that he had gone quite mad, or that the aliens were trying to make him so. 

He found a scanner, and used it on himself, trying to find the evidence of psychic tampering that the aliens were sure to leave behind. He found nothing. 

Then, he scanned his surroundings, where the noises still continued, though slightly lesser in pitch now. 

According to the scanners, there was nothing there with him. The scanners were wrong. 

Jack Harkness had been turning from place to place, trying to scan everything in the vicinity. There was no time to waste. But then, as he pointed the scanner near the great cog door of the base, he was gripped with something close to terror. 

He found it impossible to look away, transfixed as he was on that place. He was surrounded by a feeling of searing hot and burning cold, and he could not look anywhere else. He may not even have wanted to. 

Before the great cog door, a mass was slowly congealing from the air. It was dark and shadowed, and didn’t have much form, except for impossible angles and endless curves that Jack, despite his well-traveled nature, did not have the words to describe. 

Slowly, the mass solidified. It did not gain colour, but stayed, writhing in the shadow, floating a foot above the ground. 

Jack couldn’t speak. Horror fell on him, even as a part of his mind was screaming at him to act. He could not. He stood, and he watched, as the formless, writhing blob of nothingness slowly solidified and changed its shape in more permanent fashion. 

A general outline of the thing started showing two arms and two legs, in addition to many other appendages, still writhing about. The appendages appeared, disappeared, bent at the wrong angles, wrapped around invisible otherness, but the man-like shape at the center solidified more and more. 

Jack knew not what he was watching, and still he could not find his voice. It was so unlike him; he wanted to scream, to demand what this creature was, what it was doing here, but his heart refused to leave his throat, and he could not speak. 

With his speech failing him, Jack wanted to resort to immediate violence. The creature before him was foul, and monstrous, and beyond his understanding, and he wanted to take his Webley and shoot it. Kill it, if he could. 

His hand made a feeble movement towards the gun, but his fingers couldn’t grasp it. They lacked the strength, or possibly, Jack lacked the strength of will. 

The creature seemed to have noticed his movements, nevertheless. The black shadow walked and glided and flew towards him, the writhing masses which were a part of it reaching out to him. Jack thought he would die, possibly forever. 

Instead, the writhing masses streaked past him, and something not unlike a hand took the gun from his side. The monster before him held it up as if to inspect it, with no eyes and too many eyes all at once. 

Then, the gun melted away as if it had never existed at all, disappearing from the creature’s hands. 

Jack took a step back, and was glad to find that his legs were still obeying his commands. It didn’t help him much to get away from the shadow before him, but it gave him courage beyond measure, for just a moment. He croaked the question, from a throat that felt as though it hadn’t seen water in seven days:

What are you? 

The sound of the storm, nearly forgotten in its monotonousness, swelled once more. The feeling that there was a voice hidden in those sounds became stronger, but Jack had no hope of understanding any of it. 

The storm raged, interspersed with the thunder, and higher, lighter sounds as of raindrops falling on different surfaces. Still the mass of shadow was taking form, and becoming more solid. The writhing of the appendages that were more than the four Jack possessed seemed to dim, as if they were being hidden from sight. 

It was a slow change, Jack thought, though in reality, had he been able to watch the clock, he would have seen that no more than three minutes had passed since the shadow first showed itself to him. 

Even as the shadow completed its transformation into a more familiar form, Jack thought that he heard above the raging of the storm a familiar sound. It was one that filled his heart with hope and joy, usually. At this moment, he could only hear how much the sounds fitted with all the noises that came from the shadow; how they came to crescendo together. Suddenly, that sound, the sound of the universe, the music of the spheres, surrounded him and terrified him more than anything ever had. 

He looked around to see the source, but found nothing. Then the noise died away, all of it, and Jack thought to look back to the shadow that had come to him. 

But there was no shadow, only the shape of a man. That man took a single step forward, coming into the light of the Hub. 

The sight of him filled Jack Harkness with more fear than the formless, impossible thing had done, for standing there in front of him, born of the formless and impossible entity, stood his friend, the Doctor, next to his wooden blue box, which he called Tardis.


End file.
